When I was 29 years old, I started an information technology consulting firm. Our goal was to persuade Fortune 1000 companies to hire us to convert their information systems to Microsoft Windows. It was 1991, and there wasn’t much Windows programming expertise in the marketplace.
In our first few months I made more than 500 cold calls, scheduling only 35 sales meetings. At each of those 35 meetings I was rejected. Yes, at every single one.
The frustrating part was that I was selling against Big Six consulting firms that had never done a full Windows implementation before. On these sales calls, I was competing against men in their 50s, men in suits, men representing companies that were considered “safe.”
And there I was, in my 20s, a total nerd, fresh from Microsoft. I had worked on the Windows engineering team. I had years of relevant engineering experience, and my staff had even more. But the sales prospects chose the competition over us every time.
New Kids on the Block
I kept hearing wishy-washy reasons as to why they wouldn’t buy, such as “I need to check our budget” and “We haven’t worked...